The saddest book
On lip service to Lenin, digital citizenship, and the path not taken in one of the world's largest countries
One of the saddest books of all time wasn't written to bring anyone down. When Mikhail Gorbachev published "Perestroika" in 1987, he may have paid lip service to the Soviet institutions he inherited (an early subchapter is titled "Turning to Lenin, an Ideological Source of Perestroika"), but it was evident that he was trying to steer a very big ship of state in a very different direction.
■ Gorbachev never got to see his plans through to fulfillment; by the end of 1991, he was out of power and it looked like Russia was on a fast track to liberalization. We know now that it wasn't.
■ The Baltic states -- Estonia, Lithuania, and Latvia -- have shown that an escape vector from Soviet Communism was possible to achieve. Their economies have grown enviably, their freedoms are strong, and Estonia has even become a world leader in "digital citizenship". Lithuania's prime minister is a woman born in Generation X, and all three countries cleared the hurdles for EU membership years ago.
■ Russia, by contrast, is ruled by a cruel regime that invades its neighbors with blood lust and murders political prisoners like Alexei Navalny.
■ Russia could have taken a different path, and the consequences of its failure are incalculable. Communism wasted immeasurable potential human happiness, and the failure to escape the hangover from Communism wastes even more.
■ Even worse, the failure to achieve a sustainable transition from the USSR to a liberalized Russian state means that there is no road map left behind for other countries to follow for a similar transition. Most significantly, China will someday reject Communism (it is an inherently unstable and unsustainable regime), and Russia's failure to "pilot test" what a successful post-Communist transition could look like in a country of 140 million will leave matters even worse when China has to do the same with 10 times as many people.
■ Theodore Roosevelt once counseled, "[W]e must face the facts as they are. We must neither surrender ourselves to foolish optimism, nor succumb to a timid and ignoble pessimism."
■ Deep down, people know they are meant to be free. No amount of repression can stop them from reasoning it spontaneously, even if all influence from the outside world is cut off. That ought to be our optimism.
■ But despotic regimes are selfish and cruel and don't often hesitate to destroy their righteous opponents. That is our inescapable pessimism. Navalny saw his fate coming. Ultimately, it is and must be up to Russia to heal itself. But anyone who does the bidding of the irredeemable tyranny there is themselves a disgrace. The evil will fall someday -- but the human happiness sacrificed in the meantime is abominable.
